House of Lords

Debate between Lord Sutherland of Houndwood and Lord Maxton

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel for introducing this debate. During the Recess, I read that his stepson, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, had contracted pneumonia. I hope that he is now well on the road to recovery. I shall make two points, one of which is in relation to the transport problems of my noble friends Lady Taylor and Lord Foulkes. I attend this debate having taken today five forms of transport to get here. I took a car to a hotel on the Isle of Arran, a bus across the island, a boat from the island to the mainland, a train to Glasgow and a train from Glasgow to London, and then the Underground. If that does not deserve a pat on the back, perhaps it should.

My noble friend Lord Gordon of Strathblane and I are the same age and will be 80 next year, which means that, under the proposals being put forward, we might have to retire. However, recently I did an online test which showed that my real physical age, if you take the fact that I take exercise, go to the gym and do this and that, is 60. That therefore means I have another 20 years to go until I have to retire.

In this debate, it would be very easy to fall into the trap of defending the House of Commons against those who are attacking it. I spent quite a long time there and have to say that some of the changes, although not all of them, have been beneficial. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said that rebuilding the Chamber still has to be adversarial, but it always has been such. I am sure that, like me, when he shows people around the two Houses, he points out the sword lines in the Commons and says, “You can’t step over that line because the length of the sword is between the two”. It always has been adversarial. I had an uncle who was thrown out of the House of Commons for making an overtly political, let us say, insult to a Member of the Tory party.

The question that has not been asked is not whether we should change the size of the Lords but whether we should change at all at this point in time. My answer would be no. I agree with my noble friend Lord Clark that we have to have legislation but, before we have legislation, surely we have to look at the whole way in which we are governed, including whether we still should be in this building, how and whether we should vote, whether we should vote online and the type of card we should use to vote, right through to the sort of devolution we should have to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. After all, we have just had the referendum in Scotland and have seen more powers given to the Scottish Parliament. We may have to say, “You will not be able to serve on the education committee in this House because you are a Scot. Education in Scotland is devolved and is not part of the English system, so you will not be able to serve on a committee that is about the education system”.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

I may be a Scot. I worked for 20 years in England and London. I was Chief Inspector of Schools here for England and vice-chancellor of the University of London. I think that that opens the door a tad.

[Lord Maxton]

I was born in Oxford of an academic. Therefore, like the noble Lord, I probably would have the same qualification, although I spent all my career in education in Scotland. The fact is that we are living in a political world that is changing very rapidly. We are also living in a high-tech world that is changing very rapidly, not just in terms of this country but in terms of the world more generally. The idea of the nation state may be at an end. Let alone whether we devolve power to different parts of this country, this country may have to be part of a larger organisation in order to govern itself and to control the companies and organisations that are now much bigger than a country. Companies such as Amazon and Apple—I hold one of its products in my hand—are as big as some of the countries in which they operate and have a turnover larger than those countries.

Surely we must look at the whole issue, which is why I am in favour of something for which my noble friend Lord Foulkes has been pushing for some time; namely, a convention on the constitution to look in the broadest possible way at how we govern ourselves, the people of this country, and how we fit in with the rest of the world. Until we have done that, we should hold off any changes in this place. That will require legislation but surely we should sit back and say, “Let us have the general election, see what happens and then consider what we are going to do”. I hope that the Labour Party will win an overall majority, will set up the constitutional convention and will look at the way in which we govern.

Finally, I say to my noble friend Lord Williams, having expressed a hope that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop is on the mend, that he is not talking about 400 Peers in this Chamber. He is talking about 426 Peers because 26 are here automatically; namely, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the three Bishops, plus the others who make up their number. Should they be here? Are they part of this deal? I am told that there is separate legislation for them and therefore the plan put forward by my noble friend cannot cover them. Are the Bishops prepared to be part of the plan? Are they prepared to say, “We will not attend if this plan goes ahead”? I hope so. A noble friend says, “Of course”, and I hope they will. That ought to happen. The Bishops’ Bench is the biggest single anomaly in this place at the moment. That is because this is now a multicultural society and they do not represent even the majority of the people of this country, so why should they, and they alone, be sitting in the House of Lords, which is part of the legislature, the body which makes the laws of this country? That cannot be right. It is time that we separated the church and the state completely and the Bishops should be told to go. We should resolve that this House becomes completely secular. People will still talk about religion and different religions are represented here, but the Church of England should not be an established church within our organisation.